Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson
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Curly fries on fangs., January 6, 2024Seriously?
Your first night off in like, forever, one of the few times you have enough change in your pockets to treat yourself to some comfort grease-food, perhaps washing down this fight with Luke, taking time to chat a bit with the nice waitress, and there's one of those bloodsucking hypermosquitoes at McDonalds?
Can't a girl get some well-deserved rest for once?
Halfway through the hour or so I played 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds, an old math joke I heard once resurfaced:
>If an engineer wakes up because the trashcan in her hotel room is burning, she'll get the fire extinguisher and put out the fire, then call the fire brigade.
If it's a chemist, he'll cover the thrashcan with a tight lid, trusting the lack of oxygen will take care of the flames.
A mathematician will scan the room and go back to sleep once she sees the sink, assured that a solution exists.
I felt like the mathematician after a while in 16 Ways. I had successfully killed the vampire in 4 ways ((Spoiler - click to show)UV-light, Plunger Stake, Machine Gun Scripture, Holy Squirt Gun). While I was searching my surroundings and setting up preparations for these four (and a bunch of less prepared other attempts which resulted in death...), I saw many glimpses and clues for a bunch of others ((Spoiler - click to show)I think these would work: Call the Cavalry x 2, Garlic Fries Poison Bait, Holy Bucket Door Gag, Frame the Vampire, Close-up Cross Necklace). After going through the game about a dozen times, I put it aside, content with my four confirmed kills and satisfied that solutions existed for the rest.
After going around a few times, starting anew to get each kill-method set up just right began to get tedious. Exacerbating the situation was the feeling that I was being punished for being playful. I feel this game sorely lack an UNDO-button. A bunch of times I chose an obviously *wrong* option, just to see what would happen. While the resulting death/failure scenes were nice, their entertainment value didn't balance out the chore of restarting, even with the option to skip the intro.
About that: I feel the intro is by far the best part of the game. The narrator's voice, part internal monologue, part half-annoyed explanatory grumbling at the player, is funny and hints at a complex character. Add to this the glimpses of background worldbuilding and the fragments about the PC's relationship with her friends/colleagues and her mother, and the short intro proves to be an impressive and effective piece of writing. It does a lot of heavy lifting, placing just the right images and associations in the player's mind to create the impression of a full, real world and a rounded PC personality.
Fun game, good writing, nice for a quick dip, great for completionists.
The Ferris Wheel goes Round and Round..., January 5, 2024
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A XYZZY award for Best Setting and several nominations in other categories for an author otherwise unheard of? Intriguing, but in no way unique. Still, worth a bit of sleuthing...
Keanhid Connor... It does have a familiar ring to it, no? Juggling the letters around gives us, among a list of other rather amusing possibilities, none other than Hanon Ondricek! A quick click of the author's name in the end credits confirms this by unscrambling the letters.
1) Structure and relations:
Cannery Vale is an interactive experience consisting of multiple layers of reality. While I was sitting in front of my computer screen actively playing, I was deeply engaged with the twisting and turning story, clicking links and options to see what would be the result.
Most of my time away from the game however was spent thinking about how this thing actually fit together. I found myself analyzing the ins and outs, the different levels of agency, the way the influences of the various real and imaginary characters intersected and clicked into each other. Allow me a moment to try and untangle my thoughts.
-Our clever sleuthing has uncovered that Hanon Ondricek wrote Cannery Vale under the pseudonym of Keanhid Connor. A first obvious, albeit mostly inconsequential, layer of fictionalisation and obfuscation.
-Keanhid Connor (let us assume the reality of this personage, if only for entertainment value) has written the game software. It defines the outer limits of the work. All the different story elements and how they affect each other, the characters, the plot-twists, the overarching structure. The entire collection of potential events lies in wait in this piece of software.
-Inside the IF-piece, we come upon a layer of "Real": A writer (let's call him Inkhorn O.D. Cane) has secluded himself from all distractions in a hotel room. This, he hopes, will help him in finally finishing his novel. This fictional writer introduces characters and landmarks, writes and deletes events, activates possibilities and enforces boundaries for the protagonist to act upon. In general, Inkhorn O.D. Cane tweaks the setting in the hopes of finding a breakthrough to bring his novel to a satisfactory ending.
-Underneath this, we encounter a layer of "Fictional": The novel's main character (One Nick Hardon, if you will) is set loose in the setting created during the most recent writing session, free to poke and flail around. He is not under the conscious control of the writer, who experiences these sequences only through dreams while napping. Often One Nick Hardon escapes or derails the forward progression of the plot to get lost in pointless activities or hurl himself into unforeseen deathtraps. These pointless exploratory shenanigans and dead-ends are necessary feedback for the writer to get a grasp of behaviour and mutual influence of setting and protagonist.
-Finally, of course, we come full circle back to our out-of-game reality: The player (S. Von Rasor, in this instance) sits in front of his computer screen and interacts with the IF-piece. He engages with the game at multiple levels:
a) During the writing stage, he steers Inkhorn O.D. Cane in creating the setting, opening and closing options and pathways to take advantage of inside the world of the novel.
b) During the novel stage, he inhabits One Nick Hardon while exploring the most recent iteration of the setting in detail, looking for ways to get further in the narrative. Much like the protagonist himself, the player is flying blind here, especially for the first half of the game.
Ultimately, the player is looking for a Win-condition.
S. Von Rasor does this by taking control of both the writer's conscious decisions about setting and plot and the subconscious investigation of the consequences of the writer's choices as the protagonist in the dream-sequences. The fact that the two sets of circumstances do not easily flow into one another is exemplified in Inkhorn O.D. Cane's frequent complaints about One Nick Hardon's taking the narrative into his own hands (and dying for the twelfth time...)
2) Gameplay:
When disregarding the story content and looking at the form of the game, Cannery Vale very much resembles an elaborate puzzlebox where actions on one end have causally related consequences on the other end, sometimes predictable, sometimes unexpected. In fact, I was often reminded of games like Chasm, Archipelago, or Myst. Pulling a lever, pressing a button, entering a combination makes something happen in a distant location, and it's necessary to investigate the game-world to find out exactly what has changed.
Here, the writing stage consists of flipping switches, quite randomly at first, to make things happen in the novel-world. Investigating these changes requires slipping into the novel's protagonist and descending into Inkhorn O.D. Cane's imagination through his dreams.
Interestingly, and in keeping with the writing process, One Nick Hardon's actions in the novel feed back into the conscious mind of the writer, resulting in more switches to flip to tweak the setting in subsequent iterations of the loop.
This last observation is related to another characteristic of the game. It has a similarity to that genre of games where the player controls doppelgänger PCs, or parallel-universe twins, where the actions of one in their domain/time help the other progress. On various levels of reality in Cannery Vale, characters have the power to cooperate with (or work against) eachother/themselves.
-Above, I have described the mutual feedback loop between Inkhorn O.D. Cane and One Nick Hardon, wherein writer and protagonist work together towards further understanding and exploration of the novel's narrative. From another viewpoint one could say that the writer does a bunch of preparation and then trusts his subconscious to bring the story to life and feel out the details, meaning that the writer is cooperating with himself.
-One Nick Hardon works together with other iterations of himself. Some objects or pathways are only accessible with certain narrative passages turned on or off, while later in the story those same passages need to be the other way around. Therefore, the protagonist must explore the world in one loop to acquire a cetain objective, which then is remembered and passed on to his next incarnation in the following loop, even though the passage which made that objective possible has now been closed off.
-S. Von Rasor, too, is cooperating with himself. Through the actions of both incarnations he controls in both layers of the game-reality, and the repetition with variations throughout the writing loop, he aligns Inkhorn O.D. Cane's and One Nick Hardon's choices with his goal: getting further in the game, seeing more of the story, approacing closer and closer to the Win-condition.
-(And let's not forget to tip our hat to Keanhid Connor, who made this all possible with his creation of the universe.)
3) Game/Story:
Despite my abstract comparison to mechanical puzzleboxes, Cannery Vale offers a deeply meaningful narrative experience once you drop down into its world and become involved in the story.
An unnamed man suffering from adventure-induced amnesia (a fact humorously lampshaded by the writer), regains consciousness on a deserted beach. His search for himself leads him to the end of the road, the top of the island. On his way, he must overcome obstacles, convince others to help him, escape dangers. Pretty archetypal, right? Maybe even a bit (IF-)cliché?
Well that's the point. Here lies the brilliance of the layers, the writer/novel framework. The player engages with both the writer-persona and the novel-protagonist to shape this archetypal narrative template into an interesting story full of discrete, personal events.
Once the form of this story starts to come forward, within the boundaries set by Keanhid Connor, it's an exciting, surprising, sometimes scary mystery. Threatening atmosphere lightened by funny and romantic moments, detailed conversations with believable characters, a bunch of rather explicit sex-stuff, a naturally flowing progression of events to their inevitable conclusion.
Inevitable conclusion?
I have to admit, I don't know. It felt like it when I finished, an organic whole with a natural flow.
As I only played through once, though, there are certainly many secrets and pathways I did not see, corners and roads I did not fully explore. That probably means there are many more endings, and certainly more ways to reach an ending, than I experienced.
The ending I did experience was fulfilling, sad, enlightening, thought-provoking. Much like the feedback-centered mechanics of the game, the story twisted back onto itself, spitting me out where I started. Not in any way does this take away from the insight I gained along the way though.
I felt emotionally drained and refilled, newly aware of the circle of losing and loving, having and giving.
Very strong.
Roadtrip Pause, January 2, 2024Exhausted after a long drive through the desert, you and your girlfriends pull up to a dilapidated motel. A good night's sleep will get you ready for the next day of driving and visiting the sights.
But then the neon cactus flower blooms, and the Cactus Blue Motel proves to be very enticing. Maybe you'll prolong your stay. Just for a day or two...
The visual presentation of this game is spot-on. Clean white-on-black text with a clear layout, and the links presented in a neon-blue, like the billboard out front. It keeps the player aware of the closed-off location that is the motel, with nothing but dark desert surrounding it.
When the plot took a turn into supernatural thriller territory, I was unimpressed at first. I liked it, sure, but it was a bit too reminiscent of Stephen KIng's The Shining to get me deeply involved. Creepy motel with a mind of its own doesn't want the characters to leave. Check. Age-old guests and employees assure you that the motel is the best place to be. Check. Mirages of inviting amenities luring the guests to while away their time for just a bit longer. Check.
The tour of the rooms where you meet the other motel-guests was very promising, with a few memorable characters and scenes. The conversations did get a bit repetitive over time, and I found it hard to distinguish between personalities when their answers to questions about themselves and the motel were so much alike.
The unlocking of a previously inaccesible room provides some much-needed forward tempo, when a talking Jackalope (yes, a talking Jackalope,) asks your help with his investigations into the nature of the motel. It turns out he's sending you on a series of undisguised fetch-quests. I like fetch-quests, but when solving them amounts to a sequence of overclued clicks, my sense of urgency and agency is quite diminished.
Fortunately, Cactus Blue Motel is saved by its heartfelt and (for me) relatable finale. Wrestling free of the Peter Pan fase, refusing to keep clinging to childhood certainties, facing the adult world with all its complexities, dangers, and scary opportunities can be a painful process. The metaphor of steeling your will to escape from the soothing motel (or refusing to, and staying behind...) landed true with me. It helped me remember the 20yo kid I once was, and helped me assure him that it turned out not so bad after all.
Wrath of a vengeful God, January 1, 2024In Heretic Dreams, the protagonist is a "Pathfinder", one who can, through meditative sifting through the void inside, find the luminous threads that lead to the precious ores, salts, and minerals needed for the tribe's survival.
But she has been greedy in her past, biting off more than she could chew. She has eaten of the Deceiver, and part of Him now fuels her powers.
He didn't like this. And He has her scent...
Heretic Dreams shines with beautiful prose. A handful of sharply evocative sentences per page, flashes of lightning illuminating vivid scenes or locations. The brightness of these paragraphs leaves the reader in darkness, inviting the mind to fill in the blanks, triggering the imagination.
Demanding too much from the imagination, perhaps.
Despite the broadening understanding of the backstory and the setting provided by multiple replays, I found the sparsity of the information offered too scant to grasp enough of the context to fully engage with the story or its protagonist. The fragmentary nature of the narrative left the thread floating free, unconnected, too unjoined to achieve true depth.
But perhaps this does serve the theme of the story. The protagonist's as well as the player's choices are subordinate to Fatum, Hubris leads to downfall, there is no escaping the Word and Pledge of the Dark God.
♫ Bird is the Word ♪, January 1, 2024I never knew that when birds speak English, they sound like the lovechild of HAL and Spock!
Bridget's counting the days until the end of summer camp. The people are okay, but phones are not allowed, the food sucks, and she's never been one for all this physical nature activity sports stuff.
Also, she's been having these really weird dreams lately...
On the other hand, that girl Bell Park seems nice. Maybe more than just nice...
Through the slow escalation of the tension in Bridget's dreams, the horror of the bodysnatching bird-people infiltrates the reality of camp-life. The organic, off-hand incorporation of the magic realism drags the player along unnoticed, until it becomes clear that the "reality" of this teenage story has become quite unreal.
Birdland masterfully achieves a balancing act of realistic teen drama and creepy horror.
The core story is funny in its over-the-topness, while remaining easily recognisable. It acknowledges the importance and sincerity of the feelings and priorities of its teenage characters. Some of them are there to fill predictable roles, others have more depth, all of them get space and freedom to breathe, not squeezed into a mere caricature.
The horror slowly seeping in could have been a liability to the earnest depiction of the characters, threatening to disturb and overshadow the gentle and detailed approach to their relations in the story. It isn't. Instead it presents a carefully crafted narrative opportunity: to fade out the NPCs into mindless birdslaves for the second half of the game so the budding relationship between Bell and Bridget can develop more freely. Once they are they are left alone, the mind-enslaving bird-people trying to take over the human race offer the necessary obstacles to overcome together, allowing the romance between them to grow.
Almost the entire story is in direct conversational (theatrical) writing, with the surroundings and immediate events described in "off-stage" cues between brackets. This means the diversity of the characters' personalities is related to the player solely through "show, don't tell". The words and actions of the characters themselves bring them to life, not the author's descriptions of them.
The player interacts with the story through clicking options. Some may have hidden consequences (I played through only once) or are there only for flavour. During the crucial dream-sequences however, the choices very clearly do matter, and feedback on the results is given immediately after. Increases or decreases in stats are explicitly, proudly displayed, and later in the game some options are labeled as available because of a stat being high enough, or greyed out for too-low stats.
Still a relative newbie to choice-games, I found this overt "gaminess" quite jarring in the otherwise emotionally/socially involved narrative, a true-to-life (except for the bodysnatching-bird bits) exploration of a developing teen romance. I quickly got used to it though, and it was a helpful realisation that my choice of path was completely up to me, that there were no right or wrong options. I learned to follow my personal preferences, not worry about closed-off options, and work with the choices I did have.
I am very impressed with how Birdland has an effectively scary and alienating horror subplot that serves as a means to put the romantic main story in the limelight.
Great story, endearing and life-like characters, warm and romantic bodysnatching horror.
The Queen requires your services., December 21, 2023Wait. The Queen will notify you when there is work to do.
You are an artificer of sorts, making things of glass and metal, and of substances more rare...
While you are waiting for the orders of the Queen, you are free to roam the palace and the city.
The writing in With Those We Love Alive is extremely good. Short paragraphs with a few poignant words ignite the imagination of the reader, summoning forth a world of symbols and dreamlike juxtaposition. There are minimal glimpses of a world, with slight (and unsettling) variations in the descriptions. These sparse but association-filled descriptions offer fertile ground to the player's mind's eye to fill in the rest, and to let the mood suggested in the text percolate through.
With Those We Love Alive opens with a rather unusual direct plea to the player: have a pen nearby and draw symbols on your own skin when the game arrives at transitional moments. Related, but less immediately fourth-wall-penetrating are cues to participate in the events and surroundings in the game, like a breathing excercise, or strong sensory cues inviting the player to imagine the location as vividly as possible.
I was all-in, pen and breathing and wide-open senses and all.
The first part of the game lulled me into a slow and soothing routine. Each day-cycle I would take a tour of the palace and city, tinker a bit in my workshop, and go back to sleep, all the while waiting for the Queen to call upon my artificer's talents. Despite the relaxed repetition of familiar actions, there was always a feeling of looming threat.
Things change when outsiders show up. The pulse quickens, new elements and shards of backstory are introduced, intruiging but hard to connect.
The finale charges forward in a frantic flurry of impressions, a fast-propelling chase/action sequence, fragmented and breathless.
There is a notice at the start of the game: "Best experienced with headphones." It is. The soundscapes and music are an integral part of the experience, guiding the player's mood and heartrate through the acts of this story.
While I appreciated all this, and was impressed with a lot of elements, the piece didn't move me in the way it obviously did others.
Despite the meditative calm of the first act's routine, and the additional assurance at the start of the game that "Nothing you can do is wrong", I was still put off by the seemingly endless repetition. The small variations in the text seemed to hint at events happening behind my back, but however much I visited all the locations, precious little changed. This caused a certain level of background distrust in the game. Was I missing something obvious to move the plot along? Was this routine really supposed to drag on for so long? I started to feel lost, disconnected from the intentions of the author, pointlessly flailing wandering.
Of course, in hindsight, this might well be exactly the feeling that the game wanted me to have. If so, it didn't really take.
After the change at the start of the second act, things do start to happen. I remained quite unsure what things though. Except for the most superficial layer of actions and events, I remained in the dark about any meaning the game was trying to convey.
The associative dream-like style left me without handholds, bewildered, drowning in a sea of unconnected symbolism. I felt something deeper was going on, but I couldn't for the life of me get a handle on it.
Having read several other reviews, I do acknowledge the impact of this piece on many people, but this deeper impact stayed largely outside my grasp. I experienced a sequence of beautifully written symbol-laden associative story-fragments, with a sense of deeper significance always out of reach. It left me with a sense of missing out, of reaching in vain for context and meaning.
He likes the blue things in the broth..., December 20, 2023
(A very effective horror Twine. Gruesome, sometimes disgusting on the surface, but the most scary was how it manipulated my mind into helplessness. My impressions of Bogeyman:)
Bits and pieces, shreds of brutality and gag-inducing vileness.
Images behind your blinking eyes, impossible to erase.
Foul acts, abuse, neglect.
These may be gruesome, but they are not the worst.
The anticipation is.
The certainty that the next press of your finger may, nay,
will effect the next step of cruelty.
The realisation that heroes are powerless, resistance begets more pain.
And you're glad it's theirs, not yours...
Silent acquiescence becomes your friend.
A smile is a crime, betrayal a virtue.
Is life worth continuing, if life is sacrifice of fellow victims?
Or try to sacrifice yourself.
Are you that brave... and does it matter in the end?
All this in the next press of your finger...
The eeny-weeny tinkle of agency drills down the fear.
The room of the murder., December 19, 2023(Review based on the IFComp version of the game.)
I’ve played gummibears and wizards solving crime, private noir dicks and superheroes vs villains, animals even. Time someone dropped the whole costume dress-up routine and just wrote a straightforward murder story.
Enter Last Vestiges. You step into the room. The corpse has been taken away for the post-mortem examination. All the furniture and other items are untouched, awaiting your detailed examination and balanced judgment. Two people, the landlord of the premises Carl and your superior officer Knapp, are present to ask for additional information.
I love this. A well-constructed murder mystery by itself is more than enough to the inquisitive mind. It does mean that there is more pressure on the game to provide a compelling experience without the distraction of a tongue-in-cheek narrator, parody references, or comedy antics.
There are two related conditions in my mind for a serious, realistic crime investigation game.
-Deep simulation is the first. This is a case where the author cannot get away with having the game tell the player “That’s not important,” or “You can’t do that.” It’s in the nature of the crime investigator to examine everything to the last details and search even the dusty corners of the drawers. I was surprised that the verb SEARCH was denied. I know it has fallen into disuse in modern times, but if ever there was an occasion where one wants to search things, it would be the investigation of a murder location…
-The second is player authority. The game has assigned the PC as the chief investigator of the case, the detective who leads the inquiry into the circumstances of the crime. I took this as the game implicitly recognising my supreme command through my role as the PC.
This means picking up, turning over, looking under, smelling, tasting, licking anything I deem worthy of inspection. It also means expecting the parser to understand what I mean when I point at a “mug” and call it a “cup”. Or any other synonym or half-synonym the thesaurus has to offer.
No handwaving or lame in-game excuses for why I can’t move the desk. Just move the desk, even if it takes half the police force and the mascotte dog.
In short, I’m the boss.
----loosens tie, flutters hanky at reddened face----
Last Vestiges falls somewhat short in these areas.
The clues I gathered were vague enough to leave some lingering doubt, but they did support the suspicion that had been growing in my mind from the moment I opened that top drawer. Very satisfying to see that my not-100%-sure gut feeling paid off and pointed me in the right direction.
I liked this a lot. When I wasn’t trying to yank the clothes out of the wardrobe.
“You don’t need to do that.”
Cuddly and dark., December 19, 2023Snuggling under the covers together. An unsettling dream. Waking up to a changed room. She’s bleeding! You have to save her.
KABOOM is about some very heavy subject matter. It’s filtered through the viewpoint of a girl’s cuddle toy, a stuffed hare. This means that the PC is innocent and clueless about the circumstances happening around it, and it produced some fuzzy cuteness feelings in me (“Aw! I like games with stuffed animal protagonists. Is this going to be like A Bear’s Night Out?”).
Soon however, reality pierces the cuddly feelings. Wriggling free from under the girl’s arm requires some determined action, a grim image immediately underlining the desperate urgency of the situation.
Considered this way, the cuddly stuffed hare protagonist has opposite effects. Its cluelessness about what’s happening initially dampens the impact of the horrible events, but the player’s realisation of the true nature of the game’s subject hits harder because of it.
Saving your girl requires some quite standard object manipulation. In both puzzles (after getting out of the girl’s embrace), there was a single step I overlooked at first which made them a tad more challenging.
The entire game (puzzle solving, narrative tempo, player engagement, clarity of the surroundings) suffers from poor design. The interface forces the player to do a confusing amount of clicking to get her bearings and to manipulate the intended object. Imagine having a parser without an implied LOOK when entering a room, for example. Sometimes the player has to explicitly (and for no discernable reason) refer to the PCs limbs, which are separately implemented under an “Inventory”-link. This necessitates spreading your awareness over more buttons than is needed. It frustrated me when I thought my intended action was not in the list of choices, and then found out that it was several more clicks away, buried in this “Inventory”.
Taking my distance from the technical issues and letting the story come to the forefront, I must say I’m very moved by this piece. The helplessness of the little girl in her collapsed room, the powerlessness of the hare to rescue her by itself… (This is captured in a touching image when the hare looks at the ruined house and concludes a scary giant must have caused this.)
Technically lacking, emotionally moving.
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